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Review by REMoon 
member for 2.3 years, 21 visits, last login: 22 days ago
updated 297 days ago
 Roswell,Fulton,GA
 $20 per month- (12 month contract)
 about 10 days "System and Features work well" "Currently;Not all calls ring some go direct to VM (HSI issues)" "Acceptable service at a fair price Better internet service=better phone"
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I have the freedom annual plan, been using for about 4 years (3 year on COX in LA 70817, 1 year on charter in GA 30076.
Phone worked much better with COX in LA. Has been spotty with the Charter HSI problems but is improving as I resolve the HSI problems one at a time.
Only contact with their Tech. service was at install and when I complained about the not ringing here on CHARTER they sent the BPA 410 to replace the orig. 310. Both incidents were responded to well.
I have looked at other providers but am overall satisfied and don't want to muddy the water until I get satisfactory internet performance
BPA 410 Adapter,Netgear WNR 3500 Router, Charter 10Mb HSI
UPDATE: Still working with charter on HSI issues for ring in and dial out intermittants
»/testhistory/1681265/3b9f2
Update 11/21/10: Charter internet is getting more stable as we continue to work through the service issues (tech support is verrrrrry weak) Currenty testing speeds of 18mbs down and 2.5 mbs up.
The intermittant ring in problem is still there but less frequent. I am statring to wonder if it is caused by the fact that I am still using my LA area code and phone number?? The callers indicate that it just rings w/no answer and no voicemail pickup. I have set the QOS priorty to high and dedicated the BPA 410 port on my router.
Later
Ralph
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Review by bgetchel
member for 11.6 years, 189 visits, last login: 22 days ago
updated 326 days ago
- Waterbury,New Haven,CT
- $34 per month
- about 5 days
- "It's not a highly contagious disease,"
- "Substandard voice quality. Frequent, multiple redials to connect. And so much more!"
- "Hate is a strong word -- but I hate Packet8."
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[REVISED 22-MAR-2011]
We've done it again. Figuring P8 would have gotten their act together, we opted to give them a try -- for two YEARS this time.
At this moment, we have the most reliable, robust internet service we've ever had -- Charter 25 Mbps. Everything about the service (save for the occasional outages, which does not factor into this Packet8 review) has been stellar.
I'm going to be pithy with my details in this revision of my old review, considering in all this time P8 has actually gotten WORSE as every other service provider seems to be improving. Voice quality is OK, but is often garbled, unintelligible machine talk. Since this *could* be the connection itself (though I strongly doubt it, because real-time monitoring shows a stable, low-latency connection during these frequent quality drops) I'll call this a secondary issue.
However, dialing out using Packet8 is a case study in frustration. You simply can NOT use the auto-dial, redial, or speed dial features. In fact, you can NOT dial the phone normally as outbound calls almost NEVER go through. You have to P...U....S....H.... each button very deliberately for a good SECOND. P8 require you to take a good 10-15 full SECONDS to dial a number, or a connection is never established. It will just sit there for 30-60 seconds after you dial, only to return a "fast-busy" signal.
Next is with incoming calls. Every single day, at no specific time of day, random incoming calls do NOT ring! They go directly to VM, and then take an hour or more to show that we even have a VM waiting! And no, we are NOT on the phone and our connection is sure and stable.
In short, Packet8 is little better than using smoke signals or tin cans and string.
Bye, bye Packet8. Good riddance. Lesson learned (again). We shall never return and will certainly be sharing our "success" story with any who are interested.
[END REVISION]
We were looking to save a few pennies and perhaps get even better service. What we got instead was a MUCH higher bill for vastly inferior service. If you want to skip the details and only want the "executive summary" then avoid Packet8 like a rabid pit bull. Hidden charges, poor quality, and even worse customer service make P8 a bad choice -- plain and simple.
Based on a few reviews we decided to cancel our Vonage service and try Packet8 -- in spite of the fact that my sister-in-law is an industry insider and told me she'd heard "bad things" about P8. Well, I should've listened. Lesson learned!
When the P8 VoIP box arrived we followed the instructions and were up and running in a few short minutes. The equipment came in just a few days (despite ordering on a Saturday) and installation was a breeze -- a good omen. Or so we thought.
We made a few "test" calls both in-state, to a couple of mobiles, and to out-of-state land lines (to NJ and OR). We were quickly disappointed by the notable drop in voice quality versus my outgoing Vonage line. It was like talking on a cheap set of FM walkie talkies. Fortunately we still had my Vonage modem and line as it was the middle of the month (August) and we wanted to wait until the end, since we'd already paid. Well, the Vonage line, using the same Cable Internet connection, to the same numbers was FAR superior, a fact that didn't go unnoticed on the other end. P8 has no nifty "bandwidth adjuster" that Vonage has to increase/decrease quality; you get what you get. Well, we thought that we might be able to live with the quality difference -- which we could have -- if the savings were there to offset the quality drop.
They definitely were NOT!
My wife and I have friends in South Africa. Using Vonage to call a SA land line was $.09 per minute. P8 touts $.08 per minute for the same service (non-mobile, non-"premium") which isn't a "big" difference, but could amount to a few bucks per month plus the $5/mo service cost difference, which *should* have added up to ~$100 in annual cost savings. Yeah... sure.
Much to our surprise, P8 was actually charging us $.25 per minute (more than TRIPLE!!!), not the $.08 we had anticipated (Surprise!). The cheaper (advertised) price was THE reason we switched to begin with. When we called to have the price adjusted they wouldn't budge. Informing them that this was WHY we switched to begin with did nothing, so we asked them to cancel our account at the end of the billing cycle (end of Oct), at which time they spewed out their $59 "termination fee" though we offered to return their equipment at our cost -- the last nail in P8's pathetic coffin as far as we were concerned. Their "customer service" rep didn't seem to care at all, almost as though it were our privilege to be served by them.
This is the great part about having Visa fight your battles against unethical merchants for you!
[As a side note: When I called Vonage to cancel our service they put us through to a representative that tried to offer us incentives not to switch and was very concerned (or appeared to be) about what we thought was wrong with their service that would make us switch. When I told him we were switching to a cheaper vendor he made a "prediction" that we'd be back, in a very polite, non-condescending tone. Boy, was he right!]
In short, Packet8 provides lower quality and higher prices on the back end than Vonage or likely any other capable VoIP provider. Don't be lured in by the glossy cover of cost savings for "the same thing."
It ain't.
Comments:
 | | Why did you Renew? Thanks for the interesting review. But why in heaven's name would you renew - and for two years! - after the experience you described in the initial review? | |
| | | | Re: Why did you Renew? The only reason I can come up with is... stupidity. Either that, or I'm a closet masochist. | |
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| | 8x8 only interested in business Virtual PBX bgetchel , sorry to hear about your experience. I never used 8x8 as a personal phone service. I do, as a small business owner, use their Virtual PBX packages. They have been rock solid with excellent support. The phones are executive phones with all the features you would expect from any business phone.
From what I hear, 8x8 no longer has an interest in non-business consumer service. They really should get out of that business all together, to avoid problems such as you have experienced. That way the can focus exclusively on business service which is what they are doing anyway. I wrote a lengthy review on 8x8 for my business and could not be more pleased. Using a virtual PBX versus spending approximately $10,000 for an on-site PBX is a great concept that also works well in real life day to day operations.
Sorry to hear about your troubles. | |
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 Review by neumannu47
member for 9.5 years, 445 visits, last login: 9 days ago
updated 330 days ago
- Cary,Wake,NC
- $20 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Delivery, Price, Flexibility"
- "Call quality"
- "Not ready for prime time"
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I no longer use Packet8, but I cannot find a way to delete this review.
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 Review by Subaru
member for 10.7 years, 5507 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 357 days ago
- Greenwich,Fairfield,CT
- $24 per month
- about 4 days
- "Very Easy to Set up, Decent Call Quality"
- "had lots of issues with Outtages on Packet 8's end"
- "Good if you can Deal with some tiny issues"
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About 2 months ago I signed up for the Packet 8 VOIP service, I wanted something Cheap but good call quality. A few people Recommended that I get Packet8, So Ordered the stuff I needed from the site and in about 4 days my package arrived in a white box; very easy to set up only took about 15 min. worked Great however about a month later Packet 8 had some servers fail which caused the service to go out in a large area, it would come and go, Lucky for me I did not need to make a call into the Job at the time.
I know some of this cant be avoided but it would really help if Packet 8 sends out emails to the customers letting us know if they are going to do any work or anything like that.
Also The Packet 8 Website was updated since I've been with them, the new site is MUCH better then the old.
I will try and keep this updated on how the service is going.
5/10/07
Service is still good still some issues on my end due to my ISP I tend to get a lot of dropped packets indicated by the flashing Line light on the ATA.
Some odd issues like my password wont work the first time when trying to check the voicemail but trying it again works.
Update 2 years later no major issue still
2/18/11
no longer have this service
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Review by Redbluffian
member for 6.2 years, 102 visits, last login: 150 days ago
updated 1 year ago
- Red Bluff,Tehama,CA
- $23 per month
- "Rock Solid Reliability"
- "Cost"
- "Solid service, not the cheapest"
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Going on our fifth year of service. No problems, no issues no complaints, no outages. Since the last update we have added a second line and another virtual number. I know we could probably get cheaper service, but we have been burned before by shoddy VOIP providers and don't want that experience again.
Bottom line is rock solid service.
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Review by cabbey
member for 6.2 years, 171 visits, last login: 1.4 years ago
updated 1.4 years ago
- Rochester,Olmsted,MN
- $32 per month
- about 8 days
- "better sound quality than vonage; better price than qwest/charter/att"
- "occasional outages; customer support; focusing on business over residential"
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Time with P8 at home: 17 months
Time watching P8 and using it at co-workers: 29 months
Plan: Freedom Unlimited
Cost: 23.48 / mon w/ taxes and fees and e911 service.
Average monthly minutes PSTN: 3000
Average monthly IP minutes: 15 (we simply don't know many people that we call regularly who are also packet 8 users... this might be better of the various VOIP providers would work together and make voip to voip calls pure voip instead of routing over the PSTN.)
Average outage (in the last 9 months or so*): 10 minutes
Mean Time Between Outages (in the last 9 months or so*): 8 weeks.
Connection to the net: business class cable, 5000K down, 1024K up.
(* of outages I've noticed, outages were more common and lasted longer before maybe a year ago)
I don't think I've ever had a call dropped once it was connected, all outages tend to be connecting outages, you get a dial tone, and dial out, but you never hear it ring or get any indication that it connected. On a few occasions I'm told that it did in fact ring, but that when they answered the phone they got silence.
While I run it over a 5/1 cable connection, one of my coworkers runs his over a much slower 1.5m/128k connection. It "works" so long as he's not trying to talk on the line and upload a file at the same time. A QoS filter at the firewall on our home network side of the cable connection seems to help that.
The single biggest draw back to packet 8 has in the past been their website, it was horid. The prime example being that if you brought up the account details you saw a half dozen values, and that was it. But if you clicked the edit button, then the listing expanded and you got a full list of a couple dozen values! They have rolled out a much better website, but it's still not the greatest. Their customer support however has long ago taken the place of their website as the single worst part of their service.
Aggregating the support calls between myself and a handful of my co-workers, I'd say generally we have found their support to be a crap shoot. Either you get someone that doesn't really get it, and doesn't really care... or you get someone that really knows what they're doing and cares a lot.
A good case in point, one of my co-workers was experiencing a really bad connection quality and emailed tech support about it. 20 minutes later they called him, on his voip line, and heard the quality issue for themselves, then called him on his alternate line (cell phone) to discuss how to fix the problem. it was a couple hours of back and forth phone calls over the course of an afternoon, but quite clearly the support personnel that were involved with that call *knew* what they were doing and had the right tools for the job. Conversely, I was having trouble with a specific section of the website with the safari browser and emailed them to let them know that one section wasn't showing up (error in the html left it rendered incorrectly)... the response email I got 3 days later was basically "the feature you are looking for, ____, can be found on our website by going to this URL, and clicking on the link labeled _____." along with all the usual form letter junk.
In the past few months they seem to have gone through another painfull growth cycle, wherein their customer service (which appears to have been largely outsourced to the cheapest overseas bidders) has really gone down hill. One of my co-workers is extremely upset with them about their billing him for two months service on a device he never activated while waiting for them to do a number portability request that they finally admitted they couldn't do.
Bottom line: From a technical perspective they seem to be an acceptable voip option at the moment, but they are a very young company, and seem to have gone through some serious growth pains on a regular basis. This is all very bleeding edge, and it's not ready for grandma yet... you need to be a bit of a hacker at heart to work with this.
-------- UPDATE as of 3/17/2010 ---------
Well, we've been with Packet8 for quite a while now... 4 or 5 years? Over that time they have:
1. pretty seriously redone their website (mostly for the better, though some parts of it remain antiquated.)
2. shipped all support off shore (mixed bag... simple stuff is handled much faster than it used to be, but anything complex is hopelessly lost.)
3. dropped their cheapest plan (it was only a few hundred minutes a month for about $15) and forced everyone on it to switch to their unlimited plans.
4. started to drop the 'packet 8' name and use their parent corporation's name more, '8x8 communications'.
I wasn't very happy about #3 there, as after I left my previous job that used thousands of minutes per month we dropped to less than 100 minutes per month on average, some months WAY less than 100 minutes. But they nearly doubled our bill when they killed that plan. While I was unhappy, I wasn't in the mood to move. I suspect they very carefully calculated how much they could increase costs and how many customers they would lose if they did.
Recently my BPA410 started to go on the fritz, more often than not, calls to our house were failing over to my cell phone because the BPA had lost it's mind or the connection to their servers. Talking with their support staff they claim that I fried it by driving two phones via the wiring in my house walls. When I finally learned that there was no warranty on it anyway, and that even if they agreed it was their problem I would have to buy the replacement, I was in for a bit of a shock, as they claimed I had a BPG510 on my account. (Never mind that the BPG510 wasn't introduced until months after I signed up.) and that because of that I could only 'upgrade' to one of their uniden cordless phones. The uniden phones are junk, and several sources say the RJ11 jack on them for "driving an external phone" are really only useful for external telemarketer blocking boxes or recording devices, not for driving a real phone, let alone 2. An escalation to management finally got them to grant their support person permission to take my CC details over the phone to place an order for a BPG510 on my behalf. (They no longer sell them online.) From the sounds of things, it would be a refurbished BPG510 too.
The combination of the above, and a general feeling that they just don't care about the residential user all that much any more has lead me to leave Packet 8. I've placed my order with Vonage and started the number portability away from Packet 8. The primary draw to Vonage: cheaper plan, cheaper hardware, they actually support whole house wiring.
I've updated the ratings and such on this review to reflect the more recent status of my relationship with Packet 8.
-------- UPDATE as of 6/10/2010 ---------
Packet 8 has a very interesting definition of how to interpret the LNP requests they are given. A boolean field in that request indicates the subscriber's intentions for what they should do with the account associated with the number being ported away from them. In my case, I checked the box saying "please cancel my account." Packet 8 did not do so. They continued to bill me for an account that was unusable for several months after my number was ported away from them. It took two phone calls to finally get my account cancelled, but unfortunately the effective date of the cancelation was the day after the billing cycle, so they still billed me for the entire month. I had to call back a third time and escalate to a manager to get a prorated refund for the rest of the month. Several discussions with them about how wrong this was all lead back to "you agreed to this when you signed up in the terms." It has been suggested that I should follow up with the state attorney general on this one, but frankly I'd rather just be done with them.
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Review by varrin
member for 9 years, 10 visits, last login: 1.7 years ago
updated 1.7 years ago
- Keene,Cheshire,NH
- $39 per month
- "Reliable company, generally acceptable to good service"
- "Constantly decreasing value due to significant price increases"
- "After nearly 6 years as a happy customer, I'm looking elsewhere"
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If you're happy to pay extra for what 8x8 offers, I'd recommend them. I've had consistently acceptable to good service for the entire time I've been a customer. While I had some challenges early on with respect to local number porting and virtual lines, the last several years have been stable.
Unfortunately, 8x8 has continually raised their prices and is becoming very uncompetitive. While I've been generally happy with the service, I'm looking elsewhere for price reasons. When I first signed up, the total charges to my bill was $25 per month (unlimited plan + a virtual number). Now, it's nearly $40 per month, an increase of well over 50% while CPI has gone up less than 20% during that same period (never mind competition has actually decreased pricing in this segment). Additionally, our usage pattern has changes somewhat, so we don't even need the level of service they provide any longer.
I'd be happy to stick with 8x8 if they had lower priced options. As it is, we're looking at other solutions to reduce our costs.
Update 5-24-10: Switched service over to another carrier (included porting numbers). Had to call to cancel (can't do it via their website). They tried hard to keep me. They immedtiately offered to reduce my rate to $9.99 (not found anywhere on their website). After reviewing my usage, they offered me a 500 minute per month plan at $5.99 (again, not found anywhere on their website). I might have stayed with those prices if I had known about them earlier, but there's no indication on their website that those rates are available. They chose to raise the rates rather than lower them, so I went ahead with the cancellation having already done all the work (and it was quite a bit!) of finding a new carrier, porting over the numbers and all that. Other than fairly persistent selling on the cancellation call, all went fine with the port and cancellation. Happy with the new carrier so far.
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Review by ke4pym
member for 7.5 years, 3787 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 1.8 years ago
- Charlotte,Mecklenburg,NC
- $18 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 8 days
- "Inexpensive if you order the yearly plan."
- "Watch out for the fine print - no pro-rated refund on yearly rates"
- "Price and call quality seem to be right"
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4/7/10 - In mid-January, I received a credit refund for the entire year of Packet8 service after the BBB got involved. I wasn't asking for a full refund, but, 8x8 gave it to me anyway.
8x8 also went on to respond to the NC Attny. General as well. Never heard anything from the CA Attny general. In both response letters, 8x8 included text from their agreement (and a link buried deep in their web site) showing where they don't offer partial refunds. No wonder I never saw it.
12/30/09 - I've sent complaints to my CC company, NC Attny. Gen.. and the BBB. CA Attny Gen. is next. BBB forwarded my complaint to 8x8. I don't expect much from them.
12/23/09 - Watch out for the fine print!
I called in October of 2009 to find out if 8x8 could do a better job on their yearly rate because it had jumped from $199 to $249. They couldn't so I immediately began searching for another provider. That took some time and long story short, my number ported over today so with that, I called 8x8 to cancel my service.
It was at that point I was asked why I didn't want to use the rest of my service. I asked "I expect a pro-rated refund". That's when I was told that annual plans are not able to have pro-rated refunds. They then explained that I should have received an email, voice mail, and warning on my October call. None of those things occurred.
Speaking to a supervisor was a waste of hot air. What kind of company offers such anti-consumer policies such as this?
I canceled the service and I've filed a complaint with my credit card company and state attorney general.
1/09 - Service remains solid. Phones work great, call quality is fine 98.9% of the time. It just works.
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Ordered Packet8 on a referral from my father. He scored a $30 Amazon gift card. 8x8 was running a deal on a free (after rebate) Uniden VoIP base and cordless handset. You can add a total of 10 handsets to the base.
The set is ok. It has some features I'm going to miss in my departing Siemens Gigaset. The base has no headphone/mic jack. If you're on speaker phone it won't hang up when the call ends and the handsets use proprietary battery packs. My Gigasets used AA form factor NiMH batteries that I could get for $5. Find a battery pack that cheap.
You plug the base into your switch. It has a port that you can plug your analog phones into as well. Other ports include a LAN (if you use the device as a firewall) and power ports. I chose to use my existing m0n0wall firewall's DMZ port (on a Soekris 4801 integrated PC) for my setup.
I got the phone the following Monday and it took tech support 3 days to reconfigure their back end so I could have a registration number to activate my account with. After that was done I made a few calls. I am happy with the call quality in general. The speaker phone on the base has very good call quality and the handsets are clear and free of interference.
The website is a little clunky. Typical PeopleSoft based interface. I've not found a way to listen to my voicemails online, but that's not a big deal. I do hate having to remember to dial a 800 number to remote-check my voicemails. With Vonage I was able to just dial my number and press * and I'd be taken into the VM system. I also don't like the fact that I can't use 7 digital dialing because my market has a area code overlay.
Caller ID name and number delivery work very well. I especially like the option to tell call waiting callers I'm busy or hang on or whatever by pressing a button. I chose the $199 yearly unlimited plan. It looks like they billed the plan and all fees/taxes for the year. After doing some fast math, it works out to $18 a month. Works for me.
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Review by speed_phreak
member for 5.8 years, 264 visits, last login: 52 days ago
updated 1.9 years ago
- Culver,Jefferson,OR
- $21 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Fairly reliable given the reliability of VOIP, low bandwidth"
- "Cost too much = dumped!!!! proprietary ATA would hang requiring a monthly reboot as to not miss calls"
- "voipo all the way... P8 has priced themselves out of the residential market"
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this is my first review of packet 8 and i am going on my second year of service.
I don't always know how i feel about g.729, but it seems to require less bandwidth, not as picky with latency, and it doesn't sound that bad.
My service has been fairly reliable. I do need to power-cycle my bpg510 gizmo every 3 month or so, because i will loose dial tone and miss calls.
packet 8 has been around much longer than any other REAL VOIP company. like many people, i got burned by sunrocket. i am willing to pay a little more for a stable service from a stable company. this is important now more than ever with the tough economic times ahead.
packet 8 does seem to trail other VOIP providers in features. this can also be seen as a good thing though, because as other providers are constantly adding new features and destabilizing their networks, packet 8 just plugs along... like a trusty old diesel.
packet 8 also limits you to their proprietary gizmo ata device. some may see this as a limitation, but i see it as controlled environment with many constants. this is what allows for packet 8's reliability...
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Updated: 3/15/10 - i dumped p8 about a year ago when they jacked up their rates. they have priced themselves out of the residential market. their service was good, but not that good... moved on to voipo and am very happy with them!
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Review by jr0berts
member for 5.4 years, 4 visits, last login: 1.7 years ago
updated 1.9 years ago
- Dunn,Harnett,NC
- $500 per month
- (24 month contract)
- "Features - call follow, email VM, Auto Attendant, etc."
- "No Infrastructure on East Coast so all calls must round trip to California"
- "If you're in the western part of the country, it's probably a good option"
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Our experience with Packet8 (now 8X8) has been somewhat rocky because it's hard to narrow down our quality issues between the VOIP provider and ISP...and we're caught in the pointing finger trap (it's Packet8's issue, no it's Embarq's issue, etc). Our call quality has been poor to fair to good - mostly fair. IMHO the issue lies in the fact that we're on the East Coast and they are on the West Coast (along with all their infrastructure) so when a call comes in, it has to route through to Santa Clara, CA. I gave them a neutral rating on call quality and reliability in fairness to them.
We have 8 lines with unlimited calling, and it is nice to have remote offices (TX, CA, etc) with a regular extension. Transferring a call is seamless, Voice Mail is pretty typical VM service. We have ST2118 hardware with LCD screens that have quick access tasks (VM, FWD, DND,etc). Each line has DID and is accessible via 3 digit internal extn or normal phone # or via Auto Attendant ("Please dial your party's three digit extn").
The only issue I have is quality, and I'm not sure how much of that is them and how much is our ISP.
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